


we are perfect, but the world is not

by nneiljostenn



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Angst, Depression, Everyone Needs A Hug, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Mentions of Death, Newt (Maze Runner) Lives, and a therapist too, because again everyone is depressed and by everyone i mean thomas and newt mainly, but like. at what cost. ya feel, his thoughts mainly because hoo boy does he have a lot of them in the safe haven, idk what else to tell you. it's sad tho i promise, like super angst, no one dies basically but they wish they had?, thomas character study, yk how there are fix-its? this is the exact opposite of that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:54:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29235639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nneiljostenn/pseuds/nneiljostenn
Summary: White smoke coats everything around them, and breathing is harder than usual. Thomas feels the icky tar settling down in his lungs and swallows it down. Not today – not ever, he won’t ask Newt to put out the cigarette.orNewt survives. Thomas watches him struggle to keep living.
Relationships: Newt/Thomas (Maze Runner)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 18





	we are perfect, but the world is not

**Author's Note:**

> i've reread these books again and rewatched the movies this year and it absolutely crushed me. i cannot believe my first fic in english is for the same fandom that i first read for in english. yeah, yeah, yeah, circle of life, nature is beautiful, i'm still depressed, next question.
> 
> anyways, whew. i told my friends i'm writing a fix-it fic and ended up rewriting this fine piece of literature i wrote in russian almost seven years ago. not tagged as translation because major chunks are straight up rewritten altogether, but here's the og work if you're interested: https://ficbook.net/readfic/2421695. the title used to be "hospitals and cigarettes" because it had a lot more allusions to hospitals specifically, but i cut out a flashback scene (i still love u minho) so it doesn't really fit anymore.
> 
> because this was written in 2014, it's based on books only. not that important but just to be clear this is not post-movie Newt, it's post-book Newt. no reason. :)
> 
> lastly, i may be an english major in an english-speaking country, but english is my second language and im only professionally trained to be good at nonfiction. so. apologies for a lot of things in advance.
> 
> enjoy x

In the cracks of his broken memory rests a promise: the future will endure him and the rest of the dirt splatter that has spilled over the earth when the Maze gates had opened. He thinks it would have been better to burst into tears, hot like molten lead from the sun, or whatever it is that warms up the earth these days – to burst into tears and explode like a star, to end up a black hole to match his black soul and swallow the world whole.

It wouldn’t be fair, though, and Thomas is nothing if not always striving to be fair. That surgery really was a job well-done: nicely patched up skin, with no lasting scars, bruises healed, internal organs churning. Good surgeries are supposed to be like that, he remembers Sonya telling him. Swift rehabilitation is painless and promising – one can go home after such surgery, if a home is a place indeed. Heart is beating, blood flows and still sustains the body, and that is sort of enough. A compromise, though, is a lesson learned for Thomas: a bag of bones and withering muscles with see-through skin and almost naked veins is barely a person, really – maybe a map of a person, what with blue rivers drawn all over it. They seem to be drying up, too, though.

Thomas thinks Newt’s not real and will drip down to the floor through his fingers the second Thomas touches his now-short and bleak hair. Sometimes he feels a bit more uneasy than usual, which means Newt’s probably staring at him, his look so distant and cold, like hospital light. Newt had soaked in the frost of the white walls and they’d probably mixed up the tubes for his blood transfusion. White plaster dust had gotten into his veins somehow, for sure. Perhaps, Thomas thinks, they never should’ve trusted the rogue WICKED doctors that Vince had brought with them.

“I’ll open the window for a bit, if you... if you wanna move to the bed.”

White smoke coats everything around them, and breathing is harder than usual. Thomas feels the icky tar settling down in his lungs and swallows it down. Not today – not ever, he won’t ask Newt to put out the cigarette.

Newt sits on the floor now most of the time. His hands are as pale as the cigarette butts that he leaves behind. His plaster-infused blood, Thomas thinks, is as grey as the ash he spills all over the floor. Fair’s fair – in his own hands Thomas holds the colorless dust of the new life. It coats his own skin like the sticky goo of the Grievers’ poison, clings to his lungs like he breathes water and feels it in his whole body. He thought Safe Haven was supposed to let him put down his sorrows, but it seemed to only multiply, well, everything.  
Newt stares at the other wall, through the dense white smoke, into the life that had been indefinitely suspended and crushed before it had begun. He flicks the cigarette. Loose ash falls to the floor. He sniffs. 

Thomas feels how cold his own nose is.

Time is clashing with the bare walls of this hut. It’s quite loud. It’s always on the verge of chilly – summer is slowly yielding the shores to the incoming fall, and Thomas finds his heart stuck in the clutches of grief and inexplicable longing. He’d be glad to get away from here – straight to the past would be best, to the months when it had been all far from over, but the next wave was only just incoming – but there’s positively nowhere else to go. His life – Thomas’s own entire existence – is right here, before him, on the dirt floor, shaking with cold and unbothered by it still, smoking his third cig of the day, feverishly tugging at the collar of his tattered shirt. His entire life is in this guy he’d wanted to save so desperately, whose life he put before his own, after Chuck’s death especially.

The air in their cabin is white and dense, and Thomas thinks it weird that he stopped choking on it. He doesn’t know when it happened, exactly, but standing by the open window and breathing in the night air for the first time in hours feels surreal. Too fresh, almost manufactured, cleaned up on purpose. 

He stops the thought from crawling down to his spine and almost doesn’t jerk in place.  
He will not think about Save Haven like he thought about the Glade.

All the same – this smell is impossible to air out. The stink of cigarette smoke is the new smell of Newt, slowly taking up the space of the faint memory of what was before – a whiff of fake sun, dust, grass, which had once lived in his hair, long and curly.  
They’d had to cut Newt’s hair, too.

“Why did you do it, Tommy?” Newt’s whisper doesn’t startle Thomas anymore. He knows what should be said now, but won’t speak up, because Newt also knows the answer. “Why?”

Why was he so dead-set on saving this dumb shank when all he wanted was to _go_? Why did he drag him through hell and look for the magical serum in the needle, just so he would survive? Why did he wish for a new life for him? Why didn’t he just _listen_?

_“I can’t live without you, Newt.”  
“You can’t really live with me, now, either.”  
“We could...”_

“No!” it startles Thomas this time, but he only half-turns to look at Newt and quickly gets back to studying his own hands. “We can’t do nothin’ anymore. I’m dead, got it? I should’ve been... you should’ve let me go, you got it?”

That’s how it goes, most of the time. Sometimes Newt skips over some lines: he doesn’t remember for long, and when he does it’s only in snatches and pieces that are not physically painful – a small scar still aches at the back of his skull. Sometimes the words resurface: almost always they’re the same, and Newt lets them go, and they shatter into pieces of pain and rage and Thomas gets the splinters stuck in his chest. It looks like a cheap theatre production, but Thomas bought his ticket to eternity. He knows it and watches it, always.

“I couldn’t, Newt. You know I couldn’t.”

Newt takes a drag again and the smoke he breathes out doesn’t dissolve in the air. There is no air here anymore. Thomas hates the cigarettes, but he understands, with bitter resentment he admits to himself that it helps Newt. Nicotine dissolves the blood, dulls the pain – that’s what Newt’d said once, anyway.

“You should’ve, Tommy. You know you should’ve.”

He doesn’t say anything back. Newt never really expects an answer.  
Sometimes he talks at Thomas, like the walls of their cabin are held up by Thomas himself and that’s what he’s there for, really. Worse, other times it feels like Newt is the only living thing in this room and Thomas is a rat between the panels and no one is cruel enough to kill him, so Newt just waits for him to die on his own. 

It feels like watching Newt from the screen.  
Something itches in his brain at that – and then, inexplicably, fades.

Thomas slides under the covers and tunes out the smell and the rustle of the wind and the shuffle of the waves. It’s late, anyway. The day’s over. This life of theirs is over, too.

In the quiet gloom of his nights, long after the sun goes down and Newt settles on the other side of the bed, Thomas feels the mad rush of those two weeks catching up to him and running over – ha – the runner. Oh, yeah, sometimes he really does think he’d bring back those days of terror, because one thing is clear: Newt lives there. The brave and resilient Glader he thought he’d saved had actually stayed in the past, and Thomas would run each year back, day by day, on his own two feet, just to get the Newt he knows back again.

What he does instead is wake up the next morning to find Newt already gone. He leaves silently, if he ever does – usually Thomas makes sure to bring over lunch from the fire, and Newt never eats more than one meal a day. The routine break is rare but expected, it allows Thomas a few more minutes of peace. Because, well – usually, he leaves Newt to his own disjointed thoughts, rushing for whatever work he’d been assigned for the day, and comes back for said lunch that they share in heavy silence. It’s not exactly perfect, but it’s peaceful, or something of the kind. Thomas scrunches up his nose and huffs out his annoyance – he hates himself for these thoughts, but sometimes he thinks he’d prefer meeting Newt in his nightmares, screaming in his face and pleading – _‘Kill me!’_ – and he’d rather let Newt’s spirit have his goddamn headache, and he’d rather have Newt dead. Then it wouldn’t be like stumbling over and falling on his own knife every day, straight to the heart, every single minute, like a horrible reminder of Thomas’s own childish naivety and useless hope.

The thing is, Newt’s bad. Thomas knows that.  
Newt gets worse with every passing minute, every breath, every acidic word. He is starting to believe what he says, it seems.

_“Oh, I can’t stand you.”  
“Why didn’t you do what I asked?”  
“So you lied, then, so you don’t actually care?”  
“I can’t live like this. We won’t live like this.” _

And the funny thing is – it’s the two sides of the same coin, Thomas knows it. It’s the same shuckin’ coin of the end. He thinks, with increasing frequency, now, what would’ve happened if he’d let Newt die. It would’ve been crushing – devastating, the pain of it, oh, it would’ve been unbearable, it would’ve been unyielding. It would’ve dulled down, maybe, if he got lucky, but it never would’ve gone away completely. Thomas would’ve sworn to live for Newt; he could’ve been a good man and gotten together with Brenda one day, for sure. 

But that’s all hypothetical. It’s all one big “what if.”  
If Thomas really gave in to Newt’s egotism.

The sun is warming up the walls of the hut, and Thomas knows he’s late for breakfast. He thinks, then, what’s happening now that Newt is alive. It’s crushing – devastating, the pain of it, oh, it’s unbearable, it’s unyielding. It’ll never dull down, because Newt is here, right before his eyes and deep in his soul. Thomas cannot live for Newt – only by his side, and he can never try to love anyone else.

It’s all very real, and Thomas will never leave.  
He just really gave in to his own egotism.

When he walks out to the beach, it suddenly hits him that everyone here just... gets it. Everyone gets it, but no one talks about it. Everyone, just like Thomas himself, carries a piece of their own crucial choice within them – whatever it was, but no one ever says anything other than some klunk about fate and the tough road they’re all walking. Everyone’s finding an excuse, everyone says they hate something in this world.

Thomas hates most of the world, most days. It is starting to smell like cigarette smoke.

**Author's Note:**

> here's what i was listening to while writing and editing this:
> 
> ne ver ne boisya ne prosi by t.a.t.u.  
> world so cold by three days grace  
> numbers by the cab  
> vi er perfekt men verden er ikke det by cezinando (title inspiration)  
> snow by ricky montgomery
> 
> and i'm listening to my immortal as im typing this at 2am whilst sick so i think we can all agree i shouldn't be allowed to write a word of fiction ever again


End file.
